Gorilla vs. Shark? Not so fast…

(This post represents my best understanding of SF&F consensus policy on “Gorilla vs. Shark” questions. Special thanks to everyone who reviewed it for me to make sure it really represents a consensus!)

For a very long time, it has been a nearly global Stack Exchange policy to close “which is better?” questions as off-topic. To my knowledge, there isn’t a site on the Stack network that doesn’t follow this rule. It was even the subject of a famous blog post by Jeff Atwood, one of the Stack Exchange founders, that discusses these questions under their more popular name: Gorilla vs. Shark.

On most Stack sites, the “vs.” portion of that name is figurative. The policy is targeted at questions asking for subjective opinions about which hardware product or application or programming language is “better” than the other. Obviously, the answer to these questions is almost always “it depends on your situation”, making them unsuitable for being part of Stack Exchange’s Q&A format.

On SF&F, though, we have a somewhat unique take on these question: when someone asks “Who would win, a gorilla or a shark?”, they really want to know who would win that fight. But that means we have to tweak the standard policy on these questions a bit, to make sure it really applies to the questions being asked. So, what makes a “Gorilla vs. Shark?” question on SF&F? Lets find out!

The Community Consensus

The first, and by far most important thing to take away from this post is this:

Not every question with “vs” in the title is Gorilla vs Shark!

Rather, we need to examine each “versus” question on its merits, and figure out whether the question really is off-topic. A good place to start is to look at the reasons Jeff Atwood gives in his original blog post, detailing why these questions are bad. He gives four reasons:

1. Nobody needs to know the answer to this question
2. It’s not nearly specific enough.
3. It is difficult to learn from these questions.
4. It drives away experts

If you look at these problems, it should be immediately obvious that #1 doesn’t apply here. If we’re being honest with ourselves, nobody needs to know the answer to anything on SF&F. Unlike most other Stack sites, questions on SF&F rarely solve real problems. Rather, people ask and answer questions here purely because the topic interests them, and they want to know things. That also knocks out #3 –  we learn from any question that gets an answer – and #4 – experts come here specifically because they enjoy sharing their science fiction/fantasy knowledge.

That leaves us with #2: most of these questions are not specific enough. What does this mean, though? According to Jeff’s post, the problem with non-specificity is that it leaves the question too open for interpretation. As he puts it:

Where will the fight be, in what location? Underwater, or on land? What are the rules of the fight so we can determine a victor? Will it be to the death, or under some type of points system? Can they be trained specifically to fight by trainers, or are they completely on their own? Without any kind of scope, every answer can make any assumptions they like — and there will assuredly be hundreds, all different.

As it turns out, we can take some guidance from this bit, and apply it to questions asked here. The goal, then is to find a way to determine if a question is “specific” enough to be answered.  There have been several meta discussions about this topic, and the consensus has been that these kind of questions are on topic and answerable if they meet the one basic guideline:

Can we answer this question objectively, based solely on in-canon information?

In other words, if we have to guess what would happen, or speculate what would happen – even if we think we have enough information to do so – the question is off-topic. In particular, it’s not good enough to have all of the “stats” available for a fantasy match up, because we’re talking about fantasy universes. Anything could happen in such a universe, up to and including the laws of physics being different, so we can never assume anything to be true unless we’ve seen evidence of it. In the majority of cases, that means that the determination about potential Gorilla vs. Shark questions boils down to this:

Has this fight/race/confrontation/etc actually happened, and what was the outcome.

(This is not a hard and fast rule — there are cases where we can predict the outcome with very high confidence — but they are rare.)

What Makes A Bad Question?

So, we have a good rule, but it sounds like the only way to know if a question is on-topic is to either know the answer, or even worse, to know for a fact that there is no answer. That’s obviously sub-optimal, as it rules out a huge fraction of the community from being able to moderate those questions. Fortunately, there are a couple of rules of thumb that will help weed out the worst such questions, with pretty good accuracy. (There will always be mistakes, of course, but that’s why we have meta.) The following types of questions almost always turn out to be off-topic:

Totally Different Universes

Does the question ask for a match-up between fictional characters from two completely different universes? (This includes a match-up in the “Real world.”) If the match up cannot possibly happen because the characters never coexist, the question is off-topic. Sure, it seems trivial to ask “Could The Hulk beat up Floyd Mayweather?”, but as far as we know, Earth-616 has no Floyd Mayweather, so who knows?

This is probably the biggest category of real Gorilla vs Shark questions in SF&F. For example, A fight between Dr Manhattan and Electro from spiderman [closed] was closed, properly, because those two characters will never meet. Similarly, Can a lightsaber be stopped by captain America’s shield? [on hold] asks about a confrontation that can’t really happen. Note that we can probably make a really good guess what would happen in the latter case, based on other things that have happened in the respective universes. But that’s not enough — there is no canon answer to this question, so it’s off topic. And note that it doesn’t just apply to fight between fictional characters: Is a warp drive better than a hyperdrive? [closed] is also closed, because Star Trek and Star Wars just do not coexist.

Known Never to Have Happened

These are a bit trickier, but in some cases, the amount of canon information is small enough that we know an in-universe confrontation is impossible. A good example is Who would win a fight between Tom Bombadil and a Nazgul? [closed]. This one was a bit contentious, because it doesn’t fit our first criteria — both of these characters are from the Lord of the Rings universe and could have met. But we know that they didn’t, and it’s unclear what other information we have that could help predict the outcome of such a confrontation. We also know that no new canon information is forthcoming to change that situation. So, this one remained closed.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that just because a particular match-up hasn’t happened in-canon does not automatically make the question off-topic, though it’s definitely a huge red flag. Ultimately, what we need to determine is:  do we have enough information to accurately determine what would happen, without resorting to speculation. For example, the seemingly silly question Could the Earth-2149 Squirrel Girl destroy Colonel America’s shield? asks about something that hasn’t happened, and isn’t likely to happen (given the two characters’ personalities); nonetheless, the question is specific enough that we can use in-canon information (in this case, what we know about Earth-2149 squirrels and vibranium) to give a concrete answer.

(This question does delve into another contentious topic — what exactly we mean when we say “no scientific explanations”, or “no assumptions unless we have evidence” — but we’ll save that for a different blog post.)

Too Vague / No Clear Answer

Does the question leave so much open to interpretation that the question becomes meaningless? Does the question asks for a match up that depends on too many factors to know the answer? For example, numenor vs. gondolin [closed] asks about a confrontation that definitely could have happened in the Lord of the Rings. But there are any number of things that would sway such a battle — luck, natural events, competency of leadership, etc. There’s just no “one good answer” to this question.

Another problematic type of question are those that could, in theory, happen in more than one fictional universe. Many fantasy or urban fantasy settings have very similar types of creatures in them: vampires, zombies, werewolves, dragons, etc. Asking who would win such a fight in general isn’t answerable. For example, if you were to ask “Could a Werewolf beat a Vampire”, the answer would be very different in The Dresden Files (probably not) vs. The Vampire Diaries (depends on the day).

When In Doubt?

Sometimes, the decision is easy. A question like Spider-Man Vs The Hulk is probably not “Gorilla vs. Shark” — these are two characters that interact with each other on a regular basis, so it’s pretty likely they’ve fought at some point.

Unfortunately, it’s not always going to be that easy to identify good questions — questions that don’t clearly fall into one of our “Bad” categories. In most cases, you’ll have to look at the body of the question and try to determine if there’s a good chance the question has an answer. A good example of this would be a question like Vampires Vs. Werewolf. Based on the title alone, as we’ve already seen, this question should be off-topic. However, the body of question makes it clear: we’re talking about the Twilight universe. That makes this a good question: even without having read the novels, you can probably guess that this type of fight is likely to have happend (which is has), and thus the question has an answer.

Similarly, some questions may be off-topic at first, but can be salvaged. Take, for example,  Hulk vs. Superman – did they ever fight? Who won?. This question was originally closed as G vs. S, because it focused too much on some subjective questions. However, Marvel and DC have done such crossovers, so this fight has happened. Once the question was edited to focus on that aspect, it was reopened and answered. If possible, we should try to fix these questions, or at least solicit some feedback from the OP to get it fixed.

Lastly, there are a ton of fictional crossover that you would never expect, and sometimes it’s a judgement call if two characters really have shared the same setting. For example Doctor Who has crossed over with Star Trek, and Marvel Comics has crossed over with both Star Trek and Star Wars. On one hand, it seems like there wouldn’t be any comparisons that are completely impossible. On the other hand, these are typically one-off, gimmick, or “What if…?” style events, that most fans would not consider “canon”. In general, if you think a particular comparison between two fictional universes is “highly unlikely”, you should go with your gut; just be prepared to be corrected 🙂

Overall, in cases where things are not clear-cut, just try to use some good judgement — and maybe a bit of Googling — to see if such a match-up is even possible. Feel free to leave a comment directing the OP to meta if they disagree with your close. Or, you can always come ask ahead of time in chat — we’re happy to help.